I can identify with this article. My own experience makes me agree with it completely. At the age of 7, I learned BASIC on Spectrum 48. At the age of 9, I wrot

I can identify with this article. My own experience makes me agree with it completely. At the age of 7, I learned BASIC on Spectrum 48. At the age of 9, I wrote a program for my mom to use in her biology class. It's still the most awful spaghetti programming I can remember seeing in my life. It had some really toxic uses of GOTO, but I remember it also had a few uses of GOTO which were actually attempts at more structured programming (GOTO X simulating a switch/case). Fast forward to the age of 12 and Oxford Pascal on Commodore 64. Programming without line numbers (or even memory addresses like in assembler) seemed like a novel approach, but I didn't have much trouble getting used to repeat..until and while..do, especially when I realized that I finally didn't have to worry about "renumbering". Fast forward to today. At work I use Java and C and C++ and Python on a regular basis. As a hobby I use ActionScript 3 for game development. I've had fun writing an application in Common Lisp, fooling around in Haskell and messing around with Io. I once heard a university professor say "If you've programmed in BASIC once, you're scarred for the rest of your life." I don't feel scarred. Honestly, if someone tried to teach me programming without GOTO at the age of 7, I'm not sure I would've grokked it. Sure, I might have, but my point is that even though that's not the way it happened, even though I've been exposed to GOTO for 5 years of my life, I'm not a bad programmer because of it.